Tuesday, March 29, 2011

For a friend

Hi all

I have a bit of an unusual request for you all, I have a prayer request but not for myself.  A friend of mine, who I will not name as to respect their privacy, recently went in for a regular medical checkup and at that time some precancerous cells were found.  They were very fortunate as this was discovered early and the medical professionals didn't believe that the cells had a chance to spread so a surgery was scheduled and these cells were removed.  The surgery was a success however my friend will be going back in to surgery in the next little bit just to ensure that there are no more problems and just to confirm that the cancer did not have a chance to spread.  So if you could all keep my friend in your prayers for the next little bit just praying that there was no spread and that all the cancer has been removed that would be very appreciated.

Otherwise I hope that you are all having great weeks and Becky I am seeing that it looks to be warming up in Winnipeg so it looks like you can be excited for the next official season in Manitoba which seems to be flood season and then mosquito season and then back to winter (ahh the joys of living in Manitoba).

Love

Wes

Sunday, March 20, 2011

We Love You Japan

Our school made this video and put it up on youtube in the hopes of providing encouragement to the people of Japan.



Did you see me? I was there in the crowd.

Mom

Outhouse Calender pic just for you!


Kosovo Pictures!!

This is a picture of a wonderful chicken curry that we had in a restaurant and guess how much it was??? 4 Euros! I know I know, so cheap!!!
And this was the capuccino that I had. Honestly it was 2 mouthfuls of capuccino and A MOUNTAIN of whipping cream. (I shared mine!)

A wonderful find as we were driving through Kosovo!


SNOW!!!
Snow and mountains!!




Saturday, March 19, 2011

So . . . what do ya think?

I got my hair cut . . . and straightened!




Don't worry . . . its not permanent. I went to the salon and they gave me a nice head massage and then styled my hair. The stylist just started straightening it . . . I didn't ask for it to be straightened, she just decided to do it. Shelley really likes it straight, I prefer it curly. What do you think? [Not that it matters, as I will be wearing it curly . . . but your opinions will be duly noted . . . and ignored ;) ]


There are other cheapstakes out there . . .

I have become addicted to the Vinyl Cafe - a radio broadcast on CBC. Steward McLean, is an excellent story teller, he has a remarkable voice, and a wonderful sense of timing. It comes on every Saturday morning after Adventures in Odyessy (By the way, they are playing new shows - this weeks was a continuation of last weeks - called the Green Ring Conspiracy - its really really good, apparently you can listen online at whitsend.org). Last week, Steward McLean told a story about his time growing up in Montreal, and one particular story made me think of Wes, and his never ceasing quest to obtain free or discounted entrance into events.

As mentioned, Steward McLean grew up in Montreal during the 60s. While he was a university student, many of the big Greats in rock at the time were playing at a particular theater in Downtown Montreal. Being a poor university student and unable to afford the ticket price, he devised a way to sneak into the theater, not only to catch the acts, but also to meet the members. His plan worked best in the winter, particularly when it was snowing. A small cafe/shop was just down the street from the theater, and it was to that shop that Steward McLean would head to prior to the show. There he would remove his outercoat, revealing a short sleeve shirt, hang up the jacket, then walk to the back door of the theater. Surrounding this back door was usually a collection of impressionable, highly excitable, and head-over-heels in love girls, who would wait in giddy anticipation at the back door in hopes of a glimpse or, even better, a chance to meet their musical heros. Seeing a young man, in short sleeves, walking in the softly falling snow with a decided sense of purpose towards the back door, these groupies would assume that he belonged inside and would begin clamouring for him to let them in. Steward McLean would then knock at the back door, and when security would open it, he would push himself inside, and direct the overwhelmed guard, over his shoulder as he walked in, to "not let any of THEM in". The trick, he said, was to just keep walking. Apparently he succeeded several times to gain entrance.

The story reminded me so much of Wes (and for that matter Dad), that I just had to pass it on. I do NOT, I repeat, NOT condone Steward McLean's actions, and I would be HORRIFIED, repeat HORRIFIED, if I found out that my brother (or father) attempted such a thing. Though it was a good story.

I did it!

After three and a half months, countless moments of doubts, sore muscles and aching limbs, tired days and exhausted sleeps (maybe a little bit of an exaggeration . . . but not much), I did it! I ran 10km! Unfortunately, I've only ran it twice this past week, but I still have one more week of my gym membership, so plenty of time to attempt it a couple of more times.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Something Useful

Hi all

Now I know that we are all perfect but sometimes even perfection can be helped along a little.  I am not sure about the rest of my family but I know that I am terrible at pronouncing people's names and I must admit that this is a little embarrassing for me; the number of times that I have embarrassed myself has certainly increased since living abroad as there are so many new names and different ways of pronouncing them.  Anyways, I had a presentation to give recently and was worried about how to pronounce the name Katarzyna and not wanting to make a fool of myself in front of the class I thought to myself "self the internets knows everything there must be a website out there that can help me with this problem"; enter www.pronouncenames.com where there was not only the phonetic spelling of the name to help me but they also have an audio file which can help you pronounce the name.  Needless to say I managed to embarrass myself one less time, WOOHOO!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Something to think about.

"Others May, You Cannot"
- George Douglas Watson -

If GOD has called you to be really like Jesus, He will draw you to a life of crucifixion and humility, and put upon you such demands of obedience, that you will not be able to follow other people, or measure yourself by other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.

Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do it; and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others may boast of themselves, of their work, of their success, of their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others may be allowed to succeed in making money, or may have a legacy left to them, but it is likely GOD will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, namely, a helpless dependence on Him, that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury.

The LORD may let others be honoured and put forward, and keep you hidden in obscurity, because He wants you to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, but keep you small. He may let others do a work for Him and get the credit of it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He may let others get the credit for the work which you have done, and thus make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over. So make up your mind that GOD is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do as He pleases with His own.

He may not explain to you a thousand things which puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. But if you absolutely sell yourself to be His . . . slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love, and bestow upon you many blessings which come only to those who are in the inner circle.

Settle it forever, then, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes, in ways that He does not seem to use with others. Now when you are so possessed with the living GOD that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over you life, you will have found the vestibule of Heaven.


Thursday, March 10, 2011

Driving in Kosovo

Hey Family!!
Well we made it there and back safe and sound!! I even got to drive up a mtn that had ice and blowing snow and ice windshield wipers. Yikes, I forgot what it was like to drive in winter!!! Praise God He protected us! But I have a story for you as long as you parents promise not to go too over the top by the story and get worried. I'm telling you so that you can be encouraged about how God watches over your children.

We began to drive in Kosovo over this mtn. It has started snowing at the base but it wasn't very deep or very much. But the higher that we got the worse it got. The snow covered the road and the temperature droped by about 10 degrees. There was ice under the snow and the wind was blowing the snow so that it was hard to see. There were lots of bends in the road and the windshield wipers were iced over, making hard to see. It was really slow going, about 20 kms. But there weren't many people on the road. The diesel car didn't like the cold and had a hard time going into 2nd gear to get up the mtn.

I normally drove on the middle of the road because I thought 1. there are soooo few people on the road, and 2. if i hit black ice and swing off, I want to have as much distance as I can from the edge. When a car came i'd just move over.

However this one time a car was coming (me in the middle and he coming on the side that had the mtn) and i tried to move the car over but the car didn't respond! The other car came closer and in a moment of panick I crancked the wheel to the right, HARD. Not a smart move to do on an icy road, the other car could have caught the back of our car sending us spinning. But you know, that nothing happened. It was as if I had held the wheel perfectly straight in both hands. It acted like I hadn't cranked the wheel hard to the right, but I had. I knew it. Later i was telling the story and one of the ladies was like "yah, I thought that was strange that the car kept going like normal". There were another set of hands on that wheel and they weren't mine!!!

Before we started on the trip as well, God watched over us. Usually it takes 1.5 hrs to get to Lushnje and then another 45 mins to get to Durres. It took us 5 hrs to get to Durres because car wheel was dented and then became flat, we fixed it in Berat and then were stopped by the police... it was such a long trip just to get to DUrres!! But praise God that that happened when Helio was in the car (they came with us to Lushnje and then Lili and I continued without them) so he changed the tire and took care of all that.

I have pics but no time now to put them on, neser neser!
Love you guys lots!
Lynne

Saturday, March 5, 2011

I found these videos recently. I like them - especially the Cute Kid video - it will make you laugh. They both will begin at once. I don't know how to prevent this so you will need to stop one.

Baggage

Cute Kid

TEAM


Our TEAM leader - Eunshin (guy in the plaid shirt) and Josue (from Honduras)


This is Dongbok Ki. He was with OM in Africa for one year. Lynne, he has a friend with OM who is in Kosovo. If you meet a Korean guy with OM in Kosovo, chances are that he is Dongbok's friend.



This is David from Rawanda and Jae. Jae was in charge of the entertainment for the MT. Great guy - he was a great leader.




This is Dasol, Paul (grew up in California) and Anna (from China). All last semester I met with Anna three times a week. She had little to no English but here she is part of an English team. She really worked hard learning English so that she could enter the English dorm and be on an English team.


Jihye. Dad and I met her during the winter break when we taught the additional course during January.


The woman in the Handong hoodie is Naha from Napal. Beside her is YunJin. She is from Japan, she is Korean but her parents are missionaries in Japan. Beside Eunshin, sitting on the floor is Jerry, also from China.


On the couch is Shine (from Mongolia) and Sera (from Korea).

Sitting with her head down is Kate (from Russia) and to my left is Baigalmaa (from Mongolia) and Amy (from Korea). Eating supper from the floor.

This semester I am doing TEAM. This is a unique course to Handong. Students must take TEAM six semesters out of eight. They register for the course and it is worth one credit for them. This also determines where they live in dorm because students in the same TEAM live together - 3 dorm rooms in the women and men's dorms - 4 students per room. Thus my TEAM has 24 students - freshmen to seniors. I was assigned to them. These are International students or Korean students who have chosen to do English speaking TEAM because they want to improve their English or because some of them have spent time in the US or another English speaking country.

On Wednesday, we have English chapel at 3 in the afternoon which is followed by TEAM meeting. Everyone on TEAM must attend chapel and the meeting - attendance is taken. 3 misses and they fail. Last week was our first chapel and meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for introductions and to plan for MT (membership training). MT is common in Korean universities - they had this at Kyungpook also. Basically the students in the same class/year/club spend a few days together having fun and building relationship. At Kyungpook, I dreaded MT because that meant that students were so hung-over that they could barely function. This being a 'christian' university, I wasn't sure what to expect. On Wednesday we chose our MT organizers - food and entertainment. They selected a committee to help them and then went about arranging everything. I offered our house for the meal.

We meet on Friday at 6pm. The food committee came earlier to prepare food - preparing fruit salad, some kind of rice dish and Russian pancakes. Later the students arrived and the food was ordered - zimduk, fried chicken and a hot spicy stew (don't know the Korean name). We stuffed ourselves with food which we ate while sitting on the floor. All the furniture was pushed to the side and we laid out the food on newpaper on the floor and everyone sat cross legged around it to eat. After dessert and lots of talking, around 8, we moved to a classroom to play games.
The entertainment committee had prepared about 8 different games for us to play. We played the games as a team competition. One game, "How far can you go", had us spitting a mandarine orange section across the room to see who could spit it the farthest. The section had to land in tact - no manipulation. I mention this one because guess who won - Moi. Your mother is the champion of spitters. I was able to spit my orange section the furthest - clear across the room. Fortunately there was a wall on the other side or else I may have been able to go further. Unfortunately there was no prize or recognition given but I did earn my team the most points.
Here are a few pictures from the evening. I forgot to take our camera for the games but we got pictures of everyone in our apartment. There are about 9 countries represented in our group. I see that I don't have pictures of some of the people that were there. That night we had 22 people together for the meal - less for games as not everyone came for games. It was a lot of fun and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went.















Last weekend

Hi all

Alright so I may be avoiding reading articles by posting on the blog but I can rationalize this by figuring that this is at least productive so I can feel good about myself.

So as I mentioned last week I had guests from Malta visiting me for the weekend so as a good host I made sure that I was able to get everything done that needed to be done before they arrived so I would be free to show them around all weekend.

Anyways my friends arrived on Thursday in the early afternoon and after an initial delay in meeting them (I was running all over town trying to get everything together to host friends) I met them at the train station and got them setup with public transportation cards (3 days of unlimited use of the metro, bus, and trams for only 15 euros (this may sound expensive but transportation is expensive in Amsterdam so it is actually pretty cheap)).  After this we headed back to my little slice of heaven that I call my dorm room (everyone was adequately warned about the size of my room and the condition of the dorm, I think that mom and dad can back me up when I say that it is a bit of a challenge living in student housing in Amsterdam but I guess it helps build character (I personally feel that all my character building has made me the person I am today and I partly blame dad for all the character snow shoveling that I did and being the only one who actually read the manual for the riding lawnmower).  Anyways after getting everyone settled we took a fun trip to the university because I was still not finished with handing in a last assignment so everyone had to suffer even though they were all very hungry from their trip (hey no one said I was a good host).  After running around the university and getting a bit to eat it was off to see amsterdam.  I guess when you live anywhere for a while you forget about what it is like to see it for the first time and tend to overlook that most people are interested in the architecture and canals so when asked about what is good to see you kind of blank.  Anyways after wandering around for a while and stopping for coffee it was decided that it would be best to call it an early evening (which was good because I was exhausted)

Friday started with a trip to the purse museum, as much as I want to mock the experience it was actually pretty interesting.  As usual it seems that I am the only one actually interested in reading the information (I am looking at you mom and dad) so I took my sweet time while everyone else just ran though the museum looking at all the bags.  After the museum it was off to the Anne Frank house, just a short tram ride away, but because of a massive line the plan was changed and we headed off for a canal cruise.  The canal cruise is exactly what it sounds like you get in a flat bottom boat and go though the canals of Amsterdam while a tour guide gives you some history on the place.  It was really interesting as they pointed out lots of things that I didn't previously know.  Plus I had extra incentive to enjoy the canal cruise as I managed to negotiate the children's price for myself by sticking to the claim that I was only 12.  After the canal cruise finished it was off to the Van Gohl museum to look at some art (being that this was my 3rd time there I took the role of unofficial tour guide) but I was also pleased to see that they had a Picasso exhibit which was new (I tried to get a discount here but no go, oh well).  After the obligatory three hours in the museum it was off to the House of Boels (Boels makes the oldest liqueur in the netherlands as it was started in the 1500s).  The House of Boels was interesting as you got to smell and taste lots of different things and try to guess what they are (apparently I am terrible at this).  Finally, after finishing at the house of boels it was off for a bite to eat (I was starving as we hadn't eaten all day but everyone else seemed alright).  After dinner it was getting ready and then out for the night.

Saturday we were to get up early (at 7) so we could get to the Anne Frank Museum but needless to day this didn't happen and we ended up rolling into the line at the Anne Frank Museum at about 11.  After a long wait in the misty cold weather (everyone else decided to wait in a little shop and me being kind stood in the rain all by my lonesome, am I an awesome host or what) we finally got in to do the tour.  As mom and dad will attest it was a good experience (I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it because I don't think you are meant to enjoy such things but it was good).  Following the Anne Frank Museum and feeling that we needed to lighten things up we were off to the Heineken brewery to learn how beer is made (talk about a transition).  We hung out at the Heineken brewery for a while (they really do great advertising so that was really the attraction to the entire experience) before everyone decided that it was time to hit up the H&M for some shopping.  Fortunately because of the fact that we were meeting a friend we were only able to spend about 20 minutes in H&M (oh boo hoo) before having to leave.  We then met up with a friend and hit a chinese restaurant for a bit to eat and then back to my place to get ready for the evening.

Sunday morning early (at about 6 in the morning) everyone woke up and my friends from Malta left to head to the airport and I went back to bed to get a little more sleep before church.

All in all a good time but hosting 4 people in my tiny room was just a little too much and I don't think that I will be doing that again.

Anyways I hope that everyone is having a great week and I will talk to you sunday.

Love

Wes

Eating Healthy

Hi

I am always on the lookout for cheap, fast, and healthy recipes and this week I think that I found a winner. I was initially skeptical about the dish as it looked more like a dip (and it actually could function quite well as a healthy dip if you feel so inclined) but is a side dish; in my case it was a main course but lets not focus on that.  Anyways I have been thinking that I need to up my green vegetable intake and I figured that spinach would be perfect (I was sick of salad and broccoli was expensive).  After picking up my spinach I was stuck trying to figure out how to turn this vegetable into a main course and that is when I came across this recipe for Spinach Surprise.


Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons butter or margarine
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 2 (10 ounce) packages frozen chopped spinach, thawed
  • 1/2 cup salsa or picante sauce
  • 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese, divided

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, saute onion in butter until tender. Stir in flour and salt until blended. Gradually stir in milk. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened and bubbly. Stir in spinach and picante sauce. Stir in 3/4 cup cheese. Transfer to a greased 8-in. square baking dish. Sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until heated through.

I ended up using an entire jar of salsa and I didn't bake it for as long as suggested but I found it to be quite delicious.

If anyone else has any winning cheap, healthy and delicious recipes (preferably all three attributes are present in the recipe but I will also suffice with cheap and healthy if it is a must) I would love to hear them.

Love

Wes